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Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
DrALJONES wrote:

Report: Nobel Prize-Winning Economists Back Billionaire Tax in California

Economist Joseph Stiglitz said that "a one-time 5% tax on billionaire residents of California could kickstart wealth distribution in the US & across the world."

During the 2000 federal election cycle, billionaire political donations made up only 1% of the total - compared to 19% by 2024.

https://novaramedia.com/2026/09/21/nobel-prize-winning-economists-back-first-billionaire-tax-in-us/

#USPol #EUPol #CAElection #WealthTax #news #oligarchy #democracy .

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

RE: https://esq.social/@LeslieBurns/117323370089144840

and at the same time, also a good post about a serious subject:

"TL;DR:
A bunch of people mostly outside of KDE who disapprove of LLM usage derailed KDE’s attempt to add restrictions to LLM usage.

Yep, that’s where we’re at in the state of online discourse around AI.

I’m sorry
After everything I wrote last month about keeping your community safe and containing damage so it doesn’t spill out into public view, I feel pretty bad that my attempt to craft a compromise policy around LLM usage in KDE (which would have tightened it!) backfired and created a storm of drama.

It wasn’t my intention, and I apologize for my role in it."

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

good policy: https://sophiebits.com/2026/06/25/there-are-no-lossless-transformations-of-natural-language-text

brennan@social.lol ("Brennan Kenneth Brown") wrote:

Okay, mystery solved: There was another user that had Find My on it that I forgot about. They wiped it. Oh well, lol

isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:

"Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges."

YOU HAD ONE JOB!

Boosted by jwz:
zzt@mas.to ("[object Object]") wrote:

@davidgerard also, you’ve gotta love the typical polite fascist trick:

no, this isn’t akin at all to randomly punching someone in a restaurant and getting thrown out. this is akin to overhearing another restaurant patron spewing hate, calling them a nazi, them going “damn right I’m a nazi”, and then the owners of the restaurant throw you out instead of the nazi

it’s real weird how the facade of neutrality breaks when you ignore the weird, incorrect implication that the accuser is guilty of any kind of violence

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

Perhaps I could have gotten a laptop with a beefier GPU; my intel integrated GPU is *sweating* trying to render some of these scenes in Blender. But it's doing it.

I kinda have this vague opinion that it's good to not have to rely on "top end" hardware, that doing so puts you in a position of building or using or advocating for tech that many people can't access

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

the fight brewing over the advertising eyeballs is also very funny to me. Amazon blocks Meta's agent product because it destroys their ad market, of course. But since every company is actually an ad company, you'd expect all of them to follow suit unless they reach an arrangement in a shakedown. The idea of consumer chatbot agents being exactly like the fractured streaming landscape is so awesome, subscribing to five different whole life surveillance apps so that you can avoid the tedium of typing "chicken" and clicking "buy" with 100% accuracy in favor of typing "buy chicken" and clicking "send" with some unknowable nonzero failure rate.

pixxl wrote:

@jonny i adore how we're getting to the point where we're giving everybody personal spambots. want to waste your dentists time? first hit is free!
want to harass people on Facebook marketplace? let's go

Boosted by pixxl:
pinchartl@floss.social ("Laurent Pinchart") wrote:

I'm calling the community for help. If you would like your voice heard at the Maintainer Summit, please contact me by e-mail (laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com) to share your opinions on AI usage in the Linux kernel. Unless you explicitly request to be named, I will strictly respect your privacy and anonymize all the feedback I receive before sharing it with kernel maintainers. Please don't wait until the last minute as the week leading to the summit will be very busy. (5/5)

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

I FIGURED IT OUT and I learned something in the process

Boosted by pixxl:
jcoglan wrote:

oh goody a machine that can spit out boilerplate at a thousand miles an hour, this will make my boilerplate factory so much more efficient

Boosted by pixxl:
jcoglan wrote:

the reason management is so keen on genAI is that it lets them (maybe) produce productivity improvements without having to consider the fact that many productivity problems are the result of poor management

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
davidrevoy@framapiaf.org ("David Revoy") wrote:

@cwebber While working on open movies, I remember Ton told me something like "There's the right way to do something, and there's the interesting way."

Good advice when you're stuck exploring too much in the "interesting", but need to surrender because you know the boring way is the right way and inevitable. 🙂

Boosted by pixxl:
evacide@hachyderm.io wrote:

"Once again, a core feature of a major piece of AI technology will actually just be people working in a call center."

https://www.404media.co/meta-tests-muse-ai-agent-calls-that-are-actually-made-by-humans-in-a-call-center/

Boosted by pixxl:
munin@infosec.exchange ("Fi 🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@scalzi/117322752221535040

doing this gives them 'model collapse' - effectively, it substantively damages the model in a way that directly impedes its function.

so that's neat; best wishes to the other contractors in wiring up their harnesses to be less obvious.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
FediThing@chinwag.org ("FediThing :progress_pride:") wrote:

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/117321242779306632

One of the excuses that comes up again and again about GenAI/LLMs is "It's okay to use as long as a human is checking the output."

In the real world, as the thread attests, humans *aren't* checking outputs, because their money-grabbing bosses are telling them to hurry up, time is money, why so slow etc.

If GenAI/LLMs are used to make something, the most realistic assumption has to be that it will be used as sloppily as the company can get away with.

(And even if this was solved, it would still leave environmental problems, labour theft, energy theft, water theft, deskilling, dependence on fascist CEOs etc.)

#AI #GenAI #LLM

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

i have seen several other articles and blog posts link to the nyt piece as like "it would be foolish to believe these things weren't useful" and i am convinced that not only do uncritically pro-AI people not read any of the output, they don't read anything anymore.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

one thing i'm noticing this week is the word 'doxxed' seems to have lost all meaning.

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

the dual-sided market on marketplace is grim. earlier this year they made it possible to auto reply if you're selling and proactively suggests automatic haggling if you're buying. that's the most transparent "profit from both sides of a problem you create" i've seen yet - and since presumably meta is able to tell when it's a meta chatbot negotiating with a meta chatbot, that's some juicy arbitrage to e.g. bump up (or down) your "negotiated" sales prices with an upgrade to your subscription.

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

at this point, everyone can and has called this correctly as a surveillance product, but like my personal scoreboard is whether my calls in early 2023 remain true and not to toot my own horn (yes exactly to toot my own horn) but called this pretty much exactly way before there was anything like browser/desktop control or agent harnesses https://jon-e.net/surveillance-graphs/#personal-assistants-powered-by-contemporary-llms-continue-the-sa

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

more here https://inference.debian.net/doc

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

Christine you gotta stop YOU GOTTA STOP

Boosted by pixxl:
lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com ("Lili Saintcrow") wrote:

My daughter was reading the latest Ed Zitron piece (link below) and as an accounting student she just HAD to make a few memes.

I am SO PROUD OF HER.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

AI people literally cannot help but immediately go for "automate love for my children" holy shit HOW is this ALWAYS the first use case. I love how literally everything failed here and the headline still reads "muse is very powerful"
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-muse-review-access-to-emails-credit-cards-health-data-2026-9

Boosted by pixxl:
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:

oh, so debian is *cooked* cooked

https://inference.debian.net/

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

i had missed meta's muse product and man the hype press is so funny. the nyt's puff piece that is actually titled "I gave my life over to meta's A.I. agent and was blown away" cites three good things that it can do without problems: find duplicate subscriptions when given full access to a bank account, handle a call to dental insurance, and buy things from amazon. well, I can discover duplicate subscriptions by "looking at my bank statement," the calls were made by a person in a call center, and amazon banned muse from buying things. Aside from that, it failed to fill in a web form from a company who didn't partner with meta (which presumably means some streamlined deterministic api or mcp), and spent multiple days lowballing people for plates on facebook marketplace before the person stepped in paid full price. I am looking around for other positive reviews and they are all like this lmao.

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

fuck I know I could just fix this by hand modeling it and I could have been done with this problem like two hours ago but I am SURE there is a way to solve this with geometry nodes and no I'm not getting unnecessarily distracted what are you talking about

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
djsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology ("DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-lab") wrote:

@dmoonfire @cwebber I bet Christine could implement a scheme using grease pencil and geometry nodes and even have fun doing it

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

the next time i need to buy white goods i am going to find the cheapest nastiest appliance shop i can find that doesn't even know what an internet is.